Wellbeing and Sustainability Measure for London

The Mayor of London committed to developing a Wellbeing and Sustainability Measure in his 2021 Manifesto. This is to help measure London’s success as a place to live and work for all its residents. It will counteract the fact that for years, London’s success has been mostly measured in terms of its material wealth.  

Research shows that how we are doing is affected by many different things, for example, employment, education, health, environment, and our communities.  

City Hall’s City Intelligence team is developing this Measure of Wellbeing and Sustainability.  It will bring together data on the multiple aspects of our lives that underline wellbeing. This is so that we can track which aspects of our lives are getting better over time and tackle any which are getting worse.  

The draft measure has been developed through a review of frameworks used by other cities.  

The City Intelligence team worked with likely users of the measure to understand how it could inform their work and conducted research with Londoners to ensure it reflects their priorities and views. 

This research formed a key part of the development of the wellbeing measure. The results have shaped both the framework for the measure and the individual aspects of wellbeing to be measured. 

The draft measure looks at different aspects of wellbeing across seven areas of our lives. For example, ‘feeling financially secure’ and 'having a decent home’.

Within each of these areas we look at a number of individual  aspects – these are areas that were highlighted in our research and development as important to the wellbeing of Londoners. 

The measure will track inequality across these individual aspects to better understand which groups of Londoners and areas of London experience inequality in achieving a basic level of wellbeing compared to others. It will also track London’s progress on improving this. 

We are also dividing the measures between ‘core’ and ‘strengthening’ measures. Our research showed how Londoners view wellbeing both in terms of ‘core’ measures that are essential to ensuring a basic quality of life (for instance, secure housing), and other measures which are factors which strengthen it once the core measures are in place. 

We are looking for feedback on whether this makes sense to Londoners and should remain as part of our measure. 

The intention is to update the measure annually both for London as a whole. For individual London boroughs and smaller areas, we intend to update where data allow for this. 

The measure is being developed by the City Intelligence team. We provide research and analytical advice to support policy-making at City Hall.

This includes building evidence bases on topics relevant to wellbeing such as employment, income, health, housing, environment, and equalities and fairness.